The biggest wave of mass migration since the second world war saw more than a million people arrive in Europe through irregular means in 2015, but what do they find when they arrive? We head for the streets of London with Ben Judah, who paints a picture of despair in a city where 37% of its inhabitants were born abroad. He explains how expectation is seldom matched by reality and explores how reportage can give a human dimension to the patterns of history. Then we travel to the Sheffield of Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Year of the Runaways to meet his cast of illegal immigrants, on the run from impossible lives and trying to carve a future for themselves on the margins of 21st-century Britain.